Polite, self-effacing and one of the most beautiful galleries in the country
New Tate St Ives building
The list of major cultural buildings commissioned in Britain during the Eighties is not long and, given the architectural fashions of that era, you could be forgiven for thinking, a good thing too. The product of a 1989 architectural competition, Tate’s outpost in St Ives is certainly something of a period curio. Its architects, Eldred Evans and David Shalev, had established a reputation in the preceding decade with work designed in a brutalist idiom but, in line with the ascendant spirit of postmodernism, had recently begun to entertain more explicit references to architectural history. Prominently located on a hillside site overlooking Porthmeor beach, the resultant building is erudite and not without style, but ultimately exhausting in both its labyrinthine plan and seemingly ceaseless supply of eclectic detail.
Yet whatever its architectural idiosyncrasies, Tate St Ives has proved a spectacular success, its 260,000 visitors each year representing an audience almost four times larger than that for which the building was planned. In 2004, a second competition was held to design an extension, won by a young Canadian architect, Jamie Fobert, who had set up in practice in London after working for David Chipperfield. That project ultimately ran aground amid local objections over the loss of a car park but another site was secured, another competition held, and Fobert again declared the winner. Conceived as a site for temporary exhibitions, the new gallery is essentially one exceptionally large room, five and a half metres high and of an area comparable to that of all the exhibition space in the old building combined.
While it can be divided into as many as six smaller volumes, visitors to the inaugural exhibition of Rebecca Warren sculptures will encounter it in its unpartitioned state. It lies at the end of the existing enfilade of galleries, which have now been exclusively devoted to the work of the many artists who made St Ives their home in the last century. Central among their motivations for doing so was the town’s remarkable luminosity. Extending out from the coastline as a spit, St Ives benefits from light reflected from both east and west.
Conservation concerns have tended to lead museums to black out spaces intended for contemporary work – the recent expansion of Tate Modern being a case in point – but, working with the environmental engineer Max Fordham, Fobert has managed to resist that silver-bullet solution. While limiting light levels on the walls, where sensitive work on paper or canvas might be displayed, their design enables a warm and animated south light to play on the floor and on the field of monumental concrete beams that support the roof. The design’s seeming simplicity belies the fact that the design process involved the production of more than 40 physical models and extensive computer analysis of how the space would respond to different light conditions.
The £20million project has also involved the creation of two new rooms within the original building, a task that Fobert generously ceded to the original architects. Indeed, much as the character of his building diverges from that of its neighbour, Fobert has been a model of good manners. Much of the new building’s volume is cut into the hill – a challenge that required the extraction of some of the hardest rock in the country – and its roof has been co-opted as a series of public terraces. This is a self-effacing building but no less powerful for that. Indeed, it ranks among the most beautiful galleries in the country.
Opens Oct 14. Details: 01736 796226; tate.org.uk